The Subsect
by Truncheon Press
Summary: The first five chapters of Jess Mariano's novella, The Subsect.
1. Chapter One

_Heaven is hell_

 _In reverse_

-Elvis Costello

 **Chapter One**

 **Baghdad on The**

 **Hudson**

SUMMER had not yet passed, but in the shadow of fall, an otherwise unremarkably beautiful morning took on a liminal and melancholic significance, an Irish wake celebrated on that narrow span between Labor Day and the autumnal equinox.

J. sat on a bench at the intersection of Broadway and 116th and watched north- and southbound cars and trucks and cyclists crest and break along the prow of the traffic median. In his right hand, he clutched a deck of cheap plastic-coated Duane Reade playing cards. He kept his eyes on the traffic while practicing a no-look one-handed shuffle. His thumb worried the cards, trying to feel the cut. Slowly, he split the deck in two and gently coaxed each half around his index finger, but when he tried to interleave the halves back together, the deck stolidly refused to merge. J. turned his attention wholly to the deck and increased the pressure. For a moment, he thought he felt the two halves sigh and begin to ease into each other. He pushed harder and the cards hiccupped, bowed out, and exploded in a firework burst.

J. often found himself up here in Morningside Heights, brushing shoulders with beatnik ghosts and cadging wounded soldiers unsteadily abandoned by ivied undergrads at The West End or nursing the nth free refill of coffee at The Hungarian while he fell in and out of love, peering over the top of some spine-broken, fragrant used book—bought or lifted from Labyrinth—propped in front of him, with the waitress with the hoop earrings or the waitress with intricate braids or the waitress with the redshift lips. So it's perhaps not surprising that, as dawn broke across Manhattan, J. had wandered due north from 72nd, up Broadway, serenaded by the city's matins of rattling storefront steel gates being deadlifted by shopkeepers and the susurrus of water hoses burnishing the sidewalks into mottled mirrors. Along the way, he devoured a Recession Special and only stopped for the first time in forty-four blocks at this bench to briefly rest the smoldering soles of his jump boots.

J. got down on his hands and knees to pick up the mess of cards before the crosstown winds scattered the cards into the road. He glanced up and almost fell into the azure sheet stretched across the sky. How could he possibly be expected to go to school on a day like this? To be fair, yesterday had also been too nice a day for school. Yesterday, J. kept on walking past P.S. 405 and caught the 2 at Flatbush Ave. into the city. It had all the bearings of a spontaneous gesture save for the nine hundred and forty-two dollars rubber-banded in a tight cylinder that seemed to burn against the inside pocket of his jacket, a white phosphor round drilling into his ribcage. _Alea jacta est_.

OOOOO

FOR his tenth birthday, J.'s mother sat him down at their Formica laminate kitchen table and cracked the cellophane off a box of Bicycle cards with a flourish of her wrist as she yanked away the plastic pull string and dropped the deck into her hand with the same gesture she used to extract the last Marlboro Red and attendant confetti of tobacco flakes from a pack, back before she quit.

"My pops taught me how to play when I was your age, and buddy, if he was alive, he would have taught you, too," she said, gesturing vaguely for J. to clear a space amongst the plates and glasses and candles and dry Entenmann's iced vanilla cake and casually unopened junk mail and willfully unopened bills so that she had enough room to scramble the cards. "There are a few variations. We'll start with stud. Or maybe draw. I always get them confused. It doesn't matter." Having reconstituted the deck, she placed it face down and slowly spread it out evenly from right to left, bifurcating the table. She placed her fingertips underneath the beginning of the line of cards and, with a ginger gesture, rolled them over in a low swelling wave. She laughed once, loudly, rocked back in her chair, and clapped her hands, infallibly delighted as she was by any and all unexpected successes, great or small.

The lesson devolved from there into a hodge-podge of half-remembered rules—Did a full house beat a straight or the other way around? Was four-of-a-kind better than a royal flush?—and mixed-up variations—she swore "Oklahoma" was an offshoot of draw poker and even fabricated an elaborate story about its origins in the Dust Bowl migration that, had past not proved prologue, might have convinced J. of her yarn's veracity. At least she convinced herself.

J. could have forced a smile, some response to suggest he at least recognized the effort she was exerting to shellac a festive glaze over the annual superfluous reminder that they were alone together. Maybe he wanted to. Maybe he wished he could. But J. had already used up his wish. That was the last year he blew out candles and asked a cake to return his father to them.

OOOOO

AS J. gathered the last of the playing cards, he saw an old, bearded man with long, thin, grey hair wearing a jordy-blue Columbia sweatshirt and ragged jeans rise from the bushes planted in the traffic median to cover a subway ventilation grate. The old man reached out to steady himself against the trunk of a sycamore, and J. saw stumps where fingers should have been. A factory accident or a war injury or a birth defect. The hand shook as the old man loosed his grip on the bark. Delirium tremens. A pungent ammoniac stink wafted ahead of him.

J. stood up and self-consciously shoved his own hands into his jacket pockets.

The old man stood at the edge of the raised median, looming over J. He looked how J. imagined King Lear and stepped, with a allerina's grace, one, two, three, off the median onto the bench's wooden back plank, seat, and paved granite walkway a few paces from J.

Lear gazed upward with beatific eyes for a long second before turning back earthward to hone in on J. "Spare change for a fellow Lion?" Lear asked.

"I don't go to college," J. replied dumbly.

Lear blinked and redacted his request. "Spare change?"

J. kept an emergency sawbuck folded under the insole of his left boot. At that moment, it was all the money he had in the world. _The bum's as holy as the seraphim._ He put his shoulder to the karmic wheel.

"You hungry?" J. asked.

OOOOO

THE summer before J's last year in middle school, J.'s mother got friendly with a three-card Monte shill from Canarsie who had genially hustled her out of a few bucks when she stopped at the dealer's cardboard box office on the way home from cashiering at the Key Food on 5th and Baltic. "I knew what he was doing," she told J., "but the whole time, he had the _kindest_ look in his eyes."

Most nights of that summer found the shill and his friends gathered around J.'s mother's Formica table, smoking and drinking and playing poker. J. sat on the kitchen counter, one eye on a book and the other on the game, while his mother hosted. She switched out the empties for full cans of Coors or Bud or Pabst, depending on whatever cases the men had picked up at the corner bodega. She cleared the ashtrays. She cheered for the shill when he won and gave a consoling squeeze on the shoulder when he lost. More often than not, by the end of the night, the shill had a well-tenderized shoulder. He was, as far as J. could tell, an inveterate loser, a shill through and through, not just on the streets. But he was also kind to everyone, including J. and J.'s mother. The shill even taught J. how to actually play cards, both to pass the time before the shill's friends showed up and to give J. something else to stare intently at besides the back of his head. Losers, J. discovered, could also be excellent teachers, and J. was a quick study.

If one of the shill's friends busted early and walked out in disgust, spewing clouds of cigarette smoke and curses all the way out the door, through the hallway, down the stairs, and out onto the street, stopping only long enough to shake his fist at the neon-illumined night clouds before moping homeward, the shill would let J. fill the seat, which helped retain the rhythm of the game. The shill even staked J. for an eighty-twenty cut, which everyone else thought was funny except for J.'s mother, who fretted sullenly but silently over the spiritual risks of exposing her only son to a bunch of gambling, low-rent con artists. But at least it kept J. at home and under her eye.

The first few hands J. played, he mostly folded. If he had a hand, his bet gave him away, and he'd take down a meager pre-flop pot. But compared to the indifferent view from the countertop, the parallax perspective at the table gave J. a chance to observe at close quarters the tells that effervesced from the shill and his crew: eyebrow twitches or furrows, nostril flares, hands cupping chins or rasping against gunmetal twilight cheek stubble, scratches, burps, sighs, brows lustering with sweat.

Having assessed and cataloged the table's tells, J. started to win. Not a lot, but enough. The shill didn't mind—losing was losing, so the age of the hand raking in the chips seemed a petty distinction. But once J. paid back the shill's stake from his own winnings, with vigorish, just to add insult to injury, the shill cooled, and after a few weeks, the curtain dropped on J.'s short career as poker-home-game seat filler.

From this laminate Sinai, J. descended into eighth grade "with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance" and bearing in his hands two decks of cards—one for the current hand's dealer and the other for the next hand's dealer to shuffle when the button (which was an actual honest-to-God spare coat button) moved so more hands could be played during their allotted lunch period. Multi-colored tracer ammunition from plastic disc guns served as chips, which were easier to procure and carry and less likely to draw unwanted attention, but the value represented—anywhere from milk money to petty-bourgeois allowances—was just as real. The chaos of the cafeteria provided cover for the card game. J. kept track of everyone's profits and losses in a small top-bound spiral notebook with a mustard Ticonderoga stub sheathed within the wound wire, and all who played on a given day met down by the Carroll Street Bridge over the Gowanus after school to square accounts since the bouquet of sewage that rose in comic-strip stink lines from the river discouraged the presence of passersby.

The other kids treated poker itself as a game like Go Fish or War or Slaps. For them, the draw lay in the opportunity to cross a threshold, like smoking or drinking, as if the form was the content. For them, the money was beside the point. For J., the money was the _only_ point. Unlike his classmates, he thought that poker—in the right hands and with the right hands—could be a hard way to earn an easy living.

J.'s lunch table began to draw attention. Soon, similar card klatches arose at other tables in the cafeteria, during homeroom or study hall, on the stairwells, under the bleachers, anywhere with enough flat square footage to lay down the board. Students wandered the halls in a daze, shaking their heads and muttering about their bad beats, the rectangular outlines of card decks branded into pants pockets. The eighth grade at P.S. 84 shook and rattled with a high-grade poker fever.

Then the fever broke, as fevers inevitably do, and the students awoke weeks later in a sweat, threw off the covers, and moved on to the next fad. J. and a few degenerate diehards continued to play, but desultorily, and eventually, even the diehards lost interest. He observed this ebb with a sneer and a shrug.

The following year, in high school, J. finagled his way into a few home games after classes, mostly one-off tournaments, with older classmates. By the end of his sophomore year, armed with a meager straw-house bankroll, he was ready to storm the gates of the city's underground low-limit poker tables with the white-knuckled, desperate terror born of a gambler's bastard hope.

OOOOO

INURED or insensate to the voyeuristic tableau of Broadway from the second-floor mezzanine in Pinnacle Pizza, Lear stared straight ahead, but his gaze seemed reversed, as if he were attempting to decipher a message etched by a foreign hand on the windows of his skull. He and J. sat along the balustrade that faced the wall of glass. Both mechanically gnawed on cheese slices that had cured into pizza jerky under the heat lamps.

J. had enough money for a subway ride home. But he couldn't go home. Not yet. He couldn't face his mother. Not yet. He looked at his watch. She would just be getting back after ten hours at a third shift job as a line tender for a bottling plant in the Bronx. On Mondays, the end of her dinner shift waitressing at the Schrafft's on 79th nearly ran up against the start of her late shift at the bottling plant; she had barely enough time to sprint to the subway and catch the Wakefield-bound 2. By Tuesday morning, J's mother was nearly cross-eyed with sleeplessness. She would drag herself back to their apartment and pass out on the couch with both her shoes and the television still on and not wake up for ten t0 twelve hours.

She went through phases like this, taking on two or three crap jobs at the same time until she either burned out and dropped everything at once or got herself fired piecemeal for falling asleep on the line or snapping back at her supervisor. Then she'd sit around and burn through the savings she'd socked away in a box of fish sticks stored in the freezer (J.'s mother's ironclad logic: "Who stops for a snack in the middle of a burglary? And let's say some burglar _does_ get the munchies, no _way_ he goes for the fish sticks. _No one_ likes fish sticks. I mean, the mini pizza bagels are right there!") while she painted watercolor miniatures or crocheted scarves or sculpted pottery or cut collages or silkscreened shirts or soldered jewelry and waited for the universe to post portents.

The incontrovertibly terrible schedule born of her most recent workaholic spasm opened a window of opportunity for J. that he gauged with the gimlet calculation of a lifer measuring the walls of his cell, the footfalls of the bulls during bed check, the height of the fence, the distance to the tree line.

Giuliani had already spent a solid year extending his War on Crime to illegal poker rooms, but J. could figure the odds of hitting the case ace on the river, and he dismissed the risk of a raid as a minor threat compared to the far greater likelihood of getting rolled on the way home, which ended up happening on the same sweltering August night he took down a huge pot on the Upper West Side when his queen-jack paired up to crack pocket kings. J. traded over six hundred dollars—all his winnings up to that very moment—for a tune-up by a few Jones Street Boys who caught him taking a shortcut through Petrosino Park in Bensonhurst.

"Oh, my God," J.'s mother said when he got home. J. ignored her and beelined for the bathroom, closing and locking the door behind him. He ran cold water and rinsed the blood from his abraded knuckles, inhaling a hard _sssss_.

"Open the door," J.'s mother said and knocked, one, two, three times. "Open the door."

J. palpated his split lip, already clotted black, and the blooming violet eclipse across his cheek.

"Open the door." Her voice different now, nails packed into a pipe bomb. The flat of her palm hit the door. "You open." Palm. "This door." Palm. "Right." Palm. "N—"

J. yanked the door open and braced himself for the now-familiar corrida that ensued every time he got caught cutting classes or stealing or fighting or etc., each of them alternatingly torero and toro, jabbing lances, banderillas and horns, drawing blood with each plaint and recrimination. Instead, J.'s mother's face crumpled when she saw his. She pressed her hands together, raised them to her lips as if in prayer, shut her eyes, and cried, cried, cried.

J. would have preferred the fight.

OOOOO

INEVITABLY, J. turned his attention to the Sisyphean task of rebuilding his bankroll.

On the mountain's side: It had taken J. a year of serious, concentrated effort just to scrape together the previous roll.

On the boulder's side: Half his roll came from the summer's winnings.

Mountain: The math was inflexible; even playing $1-$2 no-limit tables, J. wouldn't feel comfortable sitting down with less than two hundred dollars, not including rebuys, and if he was serious about winning himself back to his previous bankroll quickly, he'd need five hundred just to ride out the variance of the $2-$5 no-limit games.

Boulder: "fish sticks."

It wasn't stealing. Not really. Not if J. meant to return the money, which he did. That made it more like a loan. A high-risk, zero-interest loan without the loaner's knowledge, but what's a little light embezzlement between son and mother? As for the risk, J. kept track of all his wins and losses in his notebook, and those stats commended him as a sensible grinder. He feared less the potential loss of the cache than falling far short of his fundraising goal. Still, a Rubicon lay before J. Despite his priors, despite their knock-down-drag-outs, J.'s mother never thought to hide the cache from him. Other men stole from them: money, electronics, jewelry, furniture, clothes, pets (just one: a soporific goldfish whose theft went unmourned save for the loss of its jauntily appointed bowl laden with rainbow aquarium pebbles and a little plastic castle), knick-knacks, illusions, hope, love. The only thing J.'s father had stolen was himself.

If J.'s mother discovered the theft before J. could return the money, well, he calculated this as a slim likelihood as she only stashed cash in the cache on every other payday, which fell on the same Thursday, bi-weekly, for both the waitressing and bottling jobs.

In ninety-nine out of a hundred simulations, she didn't open the box before J. returned the money. But that one where she did, it gave J. pause.

OOOOO

THURSDAY. J.'s mother made a deposit in the cache.

Friday. J. nearly broke three tumblers while washing the dishes.

Saturday. J. just caught the T.V. remote before it cracked against the end table and couldn't get his keys from his pocket to the door lock without them jumping from his hand.

Sunday. While listening to the Yankees-Sox game on his Walkman and trying to walk a quarter across his knuckles, J. noticed a seismic twitch in his fingertips. The quarter slipped from his grip. He tried to snag it in mid-air, but it bounced off his hand, fell to the floor, and rolled under the couch.

"You okay, kiddo?" J.'s mother asked.

"I'm _fine_ ," he snapped.

"You don't _look_ fine. You don't _seem_ fine."

She held the back of her hand to J.'s forehead, _tsk_ ed, shook her head, and proceeded to brew an acrid herbal tea. Why, J. wondered, were his fingers trembling? Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience. Tomorrow was Monday. His stomach churned. _Alea jacta est_.

OOOOO

ON the sidewalk in front of Pinnacle, a thigh-high girl in an oversized hand-me-down raccoon coat (too warm for the weather, stubbornly beloved) puttered toward the corner of 116th. The rapid, sparkling blur of black patent leather shoes below the furry hem of the coat betrayed the lackadaisical demeanor of her lolling head. The girl was being towed in the grips of her parents, who scudded along on either side at a purposeful and steady—but not unkind—pace, one that demanded merely the sustained peak pistoning of their daughter's legs. Blinders would have been more effective but less socially acceptable, for despite the breakneck clip, the girl still registered from the edge of her vision a feathered flitter of movement between a newsstand and a vertical traffic light. In a sudden, furious burst of strength belied by her size, the girl twisted her hands free, and before her parents could recapture her, she ran to a pigeon backed against a trashcan by a tabby cat slinking slowly and laterally toward its prey. The pigeon beat its left wing madly, but the right wing, injured somehow, twitched erratically, rendering flight impossible.

The girl skidded to a halt directly between the tabby and the pigeon, spreading her arms wide. She stared down the cat, mirroring each of its feints. "Stay, stay, _stay_ , stay, _stay_ ," the girl chanted to, alternatingly, the cat and the pigeon, as the pigeon was complicating the girl's attempts to use her own body as a protective barrier by frantically waddling back and forth between the trash can and curb. Shuffling in time with the pigeon, the girl kept the cat at bay, a complicated pas de trois that required her to keep both animals in the periphery of her vision. All the while, she somehow comported herself with the equability of an old, phlegmatic country judge arbitrating a border dispute between truculent neighbors.

" _Fran_ ces," the mother said in a tone that straddled the line between stern and plaintive. Frances' father hummed to himself as he counted out exact change for the _Times_ , having forgotten the price had gone up earlier that year for the first time since '95. " 'Shillelagh law was all the rage, and a row and a ruction soon began,' " the father sang as he passed Frances and handed the coins to the Sikh newsstand worker.

"The price has gone up," the Sikh told the father.

The father shook his head. "Heavens to Betsy," he said mildly as he frisked himself for the remainder.

"Pizza's good," Lear said.

J. raised an eyebrow at his own quarter-finished slice.

"May I?" Lear asked.

J. slid the paper plate over.

A cloudburst of crushed red pepper rained down, loosed from the shaker pinned between Lear's quivering palms. When J. returned his attention to the street, they were all gone: Frances, father, cat, mother, pigeon. Sublimated into vapor, their story irretrievably lost in medias res. Only the Sikh remained, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette and picking tobacco flakes from his beard.

That tableau comprised the totality of what J. chose to recall when reflecting on that day: pigeon and cat, Frances and mother, father and Sikh, Lear and J, repeating on a loop.

Not the moment when he stood, hunchbacked and sleep-deprived in a card room over the off-track betting parlor on 72nd and Amsterdam, hands clutching the lip of the table while the King-high club flush he hit on the flop got cracked by a donkey who panicked and forced J. all in with nothing more than a back-door ace-high flush draw that filled out on the turn and river,

not watching the donkey fumble with the chips as the rest of the table stared, grim-faced, all eyes on J.'s bloodless visage, the expression on his face he himself had seen over and over on others, a look that telegraphed the blow of an apocalyptic loss,

not the five-a.m. false dawn to the east that greeted him as he stumbled through the hallway, down the stairs, and out onto the street,

not sitting on a bench in Verdi Square, the blank in old Needle Park, as the false dawn faded into twilight— _Vedi! Le fosche notturne_ ,

not the walk uptown,

not sitting at the traffic median,

not the breaking news that interrupted WNYC's morning broadcast on the small transistor radio behind the counter at Pinnacle,

not the column of smoke that rose from the south,

not the confusion,

not the fear,

not, once his feet finally felt up for the trip, walking down to Columbus Circle,

not crossing the 59th Street Bridge into Queens in a silent, shadowed swell of pedestrians on the sidewalks and roadway,

not his blistered, bleeding, numb feet,

not the crowds gathering around the Brooklyn-bound buses,

not the smell that came in on the breeze, the smell he would never be able to forget, the smell he would never put into words—not even here,

not finally getting home as dusk settled over the city,

not walking into the apartment to find his mother awash in the fluttering cathode glow of the breaking-news broadcast on mute, staring at the door and clutching the phone in a grip that had relaxed from white-knuckled fear to relief and retightened to white-knuckled rage in the time it took for the lock pins to dance across the teeth of his key,

not the open, hastily packed carpet bag on the couch, overflowing with tee shirts and socks and underwear and toiletries,

not the defrosted pizzas, single-serve microwaveable meals, ice cream pints, French fries, tater tots, half-empty bags of corn—who needed so much corn?—ice cube trays, and cold packs tossed upon the kitchen table, and in the center of the mess, not the box of fish sticks ripped open along every seam, a cardboard sunflower head, on the kitchen table,

not his mother saying "He just walked in the door—no. No. He looks fine. Yeah, I know. I _am_. I'll call you later,"

not the sound of the receiver dropping into its cradle,

not the sense of disassociation that overtook—over _whelm_ ed him, as if his life was happening in the third person,

not the fight that night,

not the month and a half of fights that followed,

not the hushed phone consultations to friends and family—it took a village to solve a problem like J.—abruptly cut off whenever he entered the room, somehow worse than the fights,

not her final, abrupt pronouncement: extradition, expulsion, expatriation, exile, excommunication, by hook and by crook, remanded to the care of his uncle in Connecticut, return ticket to be determined.

Just pigeon, cat, Frances, mother, father, Sikh, Lear, and J.

OOOOO

BY the time J. was seventeen, he had lived in every borough of New York City. Mostly Brooklyn and Queens, with a few stints in the Bronx and Manhattan above 125th, and, save for the methane stench of the Fresh Kills landfill, an otherwise unmemorable two-and-a-half week stint on the Staten Island couch of a friend of a friend of a friend of J.'s mother.

J.'s mother had taught herself to embrace this itinerant lifestyle, but she was a recalcitrant convert. This explained a certain look that came over her face—a set of the jaw as she clenched her teeth, a narrowing of the eyes—every time the switch in her head flipped from "stay" to "go." When J. saw it, he knew enough to collect any of his belongings not already stuffed into his olive drab army surplus duffle bag, the one she had bought from Kaufman's, by Port Authority when he was still young enough to almost fit inside. _Pack it or lose it, buddy_ , she used to say upon each abscondment, affecting her best jaunty camp-counselor voice. But this tone was contravened by the look, the one that meant she was once more steeling herself against the hope of a fading memory of permanence. J. couldn't understand, lacking a baseline of stability for comparison. Save for the city, which had, until that day, remained inviolably and irreducibly itself, irrespective of each forced displacement, his whole life.

The roaring October evensong of Brooklyn crashed down upon him, and the next morning, J. was gone.


	2. Chapter Two

**Chapter Two**

 **The Land**

 **Of Steady**

 **Habits**

HAVING settled in a portside seat, J. watched Jersey's Palisades pass by up to Fort Lee as the Greyhound followed the Joe DiMaggio along the Hudson apartment cliff-banks. He caught brief glimpses, past the passengers across the aisle, of the sky funneling down the cross streets through Manhattan. The bus turned onto I-95 at 174th and sailed in and out of holy Bronx, and the Long Island Sound burned platinum under the morning sun until New Haven. There, the bus cut north on I-91, and J. turned his attention to his seatmate, a chattering strange-o named Duluoz, recent divorcee from Spindle City, MA, recovering from a crack-up, traveling under an assumed name, and hoping to Go West, young man, and seek his fortune there. They sat beside each other and thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed.

At Hartford, J. transferred to a regional that took him the rest of the way to his uncle. Family but not familiar, J. knew him best in his recurring role as _deus ex machina_ , e.g., when J.'s mother was short on cash again or they needed to find a new place to live again because they'd received a final eviction notice again. It was that same savior—now reluctant warder—wingless, haloless, yet nonetheless recognizable, who greeted J. as he stepped off the bus at the end of the line on a cold moon's day.

OOOOO

ALL small towns are alike. Upend a box filled with a Main Street, a Center Street, a Peach Street, a Plum Street, a Cherry Street, a series of numbered streets. Arrange loosely around a church. Pour streams or rivers or ponds or lakes along the outskirts. Lay macadam roadways in cowpaths or grids or both and arrange homes accordingly. Unroll thin, threadbare runners of grass to weave between sidewalks forced slantward by flexing tree roots and potholed roadways. String a ring of storefronts around Main and Center. Populate with the descendants of Puritanical zealots. Pressurize under restrictive, backward social norms until tender to the tooth.

Small towns are the perfect _contrapasso_ for all city sinners.

OOOOO

THE day J. arrived, he found himself confronted by the fair sight of a gazebo planted in the dead center of the town square. He tried to remember if he'd ever seen a gazebo before. Where in the city could you find a gazebo? Maybe Central Park, but J. preferred the small parks overloomed on all sides by streets and buildings, the ones that had to fight for every shabby emerald inch. A salt smell, a memory, scratched at J.'s nose though the ocean lay far away. _Gazebo_ , _gazebo_ , _gazebo_ , _gazebo_ , _gazebo_. J. thought the word to himself over and over until it was just a series of syllables devoid of meaning. Origin unknown, oriental corruption, c.f., belvedere: "a fair sight." Gazebo. Gah-zee-boh. Gaze-bo. Gaze. J. felt eyes on him. Small towns reversed the polarity of city invisibility. _Move along, move along_ , the orangutan gestured to the rubbernecking zoogoers as he loped away in search of boundaries, borders, demarcations, dark alleys, a gas station to get a new pack of Old Golds or at least an off-brand loosie, and the local book shop. A vinyl banner hung across the main street read " _Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate_ " in Comic Sans.

OOOOO

J.'S uncle owned and operated a diner that white-knuckled the edge of the town square. Like a theatrical stage transitioning between scenes, the building's previous incarnation as a hardware store could still be seen through the diner's scrim. The old sign still hung over the doorway, and _in situ_ overstock still cluttered the diner's shelves, befuddling the non-locals who occasionally wandered in and attempted to purchase a garden hose or paint can or car wax or batteries or box of nails.

The diner served as a cenotaph to J.'s grandfather, who kicked off shortly before J.'s arrival in this world and passed the hardware store down to J.'s uncle. By then, J.'s mother had already departed the small town, having fired herself at velocity toward New York (along the same path, albeit reversed, of J.'s exodus) and away from her dying father and her big brother the moment her high-school graduation cap hit the ground. She was eighteen years old, and the world could wait no longer, not even for them.

OOOOO

ABOVE the diner, the hardware store's office had been converted into a studio apartment. However, unlike the diner, which wore the trappings of the hardware store like a threadbare mourning shroud, the second floor fairly bowed under the weight of history, a Castle Elsinore where the ghost of J.'s grandfather drifted in from stage left, plucked his natty Italian briar from its pipe stand on the coffee table, and slid white king's pawn to king five on the chess board set up next to the stand—he was the type of player who preferred a good land rush over diddling around in one's own territory, e.g., setting up a fussy King's Indian Attack like _some_ folks.

Once, while hunting for a pen, J. found an old leather pouch filled with the vanilla Cavendish tobacco his grandfather had smoked in his uncle's roll top desk. Out of curiosity, J. wrapped the tobacco into some rolling paper and took a few test puffs, but it had gone stale years ago and left his throat raw and stomach queasy for hours after.

Two armchairs and a heavy leather sofa squatted around the low square coffee table, oversized refugees from J.'s grandparents' home—J. couldn't imagine his uncle ever going out to shop for a living-room set. While J. lived there, on and off, for the next two years, he often dozed off reading on that couch and woke up in darkness to the dull roar of his uncle's snore rattling the window frames from across the room, his own head propped uncomfortably against a hard throw pillow, with grandfather's vintage acrylic Boston College blanket (Go Eagles!) tossed over him and his book resting on the coffee table, bookmark carefully inserted between the pages where it had fallen open, spine up, on his chest, dropped by somnolent fingers. At the time, even this small act of charity—the blanket, the bookmark, the pillow—on the part of J.'s uncle, carried out under cover of darkness, so to speak, rankled him. It seemed J. was to be deprived of all choices, even those regarding his own discomfort. If this sounds ungrateful, well, gratefulness had always grated J, anyway.

OOOOO

DOZENS of photographs shingled the apartment walls: historical black-and-white photos of, e.g., Give 'Em Hell Harry clutching a copy of the November 3rd Chicago Daily Tribune over his head with a manic gleam in his eyes or Jackie Robinson stealing home on Yogi Berra in Game One of the '55 World Series or a team photo of the '46 Boston "Ted" Sox mingled with more prosaic shots of family-album-type fishing trips of J.'s uncle hoisting pendulous, rainbow trout, flounder, salmon, et al., while seated in a canoe or standing on a dock or riverbank. Wall-mounted piscatorial replicas posed in frozen arches and undulations among the framed photos, mouths agape, eyes marble bright. One made of latex rubber even used to sing "Don't Worry, Be Happy" as it flopped back and forth on its faux-wood-grain plastic plaque; its dying batteries transformed the tune into an unsettling _basso profondo_ dirge.

Fiberglass rods, nylon monofilament spooled lines, a wicker creel, rubber waders, life preservers, even a set of oars, huddled in trippable distance of the front doorway. On the opposite side of the door, stalagmitic plastic sports trophies from his uncle's childhood—mostly for baseball, track, and bowling—crowned a wooden display cabinet that held signed baseballs, Spalding gloves, and more trophies under glass.

During J.'s inventory of his uncle's apartment, he noticed the curves of an acoustic guitar peeking out in the space between the display case and wall. After tuning it by ear, he ran through the few simple songs he knew: Iggy Pop's "The Passenger," some Ramones numbers, Elvis Costello's cover of Sam & Dave's "I Can't Stand Up for Falling Down," Bowie's cover of Them's "Here Comes the Night," et al., wincing as the steel strings dug into his soft hand. J. closed his eyes and pressed harder until the pain filled his mind, until nothing of him was left but the bloodless-white tips of his burning fingers.

OOOOO

SAY your mother dies when you're just a little kid. Cancer. By the time you're a teenager, you realize that when you recall her in your mind's eye, her portrait has been cobbled together from photographs and illuminated with the flickering bulb of your recollections; that there might not be one primary, pure, unadulterated memory left of the woman who gave birth to you—not even the smell of her rose-scented soap, which, through time and overuse, had petrified into the rememberance of the memory of the smell of her rose-scented soap—that you'll never know for sure what she actually looked and sounded like when she was a living, breathing, walking, talking, stereoscopic human being.

Say at the start of your senior year of high school, your dad gets sick. Cancer. Your uncle drives your dad to and from the hospital in Hartford for tests and more tests then treatments and more tests and more treatments. You take some time off from school to help run the family store. The store sits across the street from your school. Every day, you look out the window and see your classmates come and go. Sometimes, friends stop by the store after classes to say "hi" and see how you're doing, but they don't know what to say, and you don't know what to say, and as the days and weeks pass by, they stop by less and less and eventually stop stopping by altogether. You try not to look out the window, to busy yourself stocking shelves or taking inventories or sweeping the floors or organizing the stockroom or helping the occasional customers. You try not to think about the college applications to UConn and B.C. in your desk drawer, about the athletic scholarship offers (partial, but still) that you had to turn down once you realized you wouldn't be returning to school for the rest of the year (or ever, but you don't know that, not yet).

Say you take a galvanized steel trashcan and a ponderous equipment bag lifted from the school gym out to the woods by the lake on the outskirts of town, prop the can at an angle against its lid, and hurl screaming four-seamers and downshifting three-fingers and plunging split-fingers and swinging two-seamers and diving forkers into the can, which booms thunderous applause through the trees in response to each pitch. You throw pitches until your dripping sweat turns the dirt beneath your feet to mud, your arm falls off, your hand melts to the bone.

Say the cancer kills your father. But not before the immense weight of responsibility—for him, your sister, the store—has slowly but thoroughly and utterly crushed you over the course of the three years from diagnosis to funeral. You discover that being crushed is not the same as being broken. Being crushed, you are still whole but denser, airless, and harder to knock down thanks to your new lower center of gravity. You build a memory palace bricked with the totems of your father's belongings and make your home there, a child's elegant solution to the impossibility of endless mourning.


	3. Chapter Three

Chapter Three

A Pair

of

Blue Eyes

THE night after J. arrived, he met a girl with the most dolorous eyes in the whole damned world, blue as autumn distance, true forget-me-not blue, Yves Klein canvases, plangent like the off-kilter Teutonic contralto version of The Velvet Underground's "Pale Blue Eyes" that Nico never recorded, that only existed in this girl's eyes. She was nothing less than The Cynosure of Connecticut, but for the sake of space, let's call her Blue.

Blue and J. were first introduced at a welcome-to-wherever-you-are dinner party thrown for him _chez elle_ by Blue's mother (Blue Sr.), a friend of J.'s uncle. The two Blues lived in a small blue (of course) two-story folk Victorian furnished with secondhand pieces selected by a sensibility tuned to value by birth, kitsch by disposition, and economy by circumstances. A reproduction of the peripatetic painter Samuel Miller's "Young Boy with Dog" in the entryway startled visitors with the corpse-flat gazes of its eponymous subjects. In the living room, a blood-red throw pillow imprinted with the image of a sepulchral Depression-era clown raising his hands in supplication could have served as Exhibit A in Sontag's "Notes on 'Camp.' " The stuffed singing rabbi spoke for itself.

All the framed photographs that ran along the fireplace mantelpiece featured Blue Sr. and Blue, both together and alone. Within their hermetically sealed home, each provided sufficient illumination and warmth for the other. From this cozy vantage, the rest of the world appeared as little more than shadows cast against a screen, amusing, occasionally even affecting, but shadows nonetheless.

Through the kitchen lay Blue's bedroom. It smelled like the musty miles of aisles at The Strand, J. thought as he crossed her threshold, like frankincense to a Catholic.

Blue's walls were pinned with her winged dreams: posters of the Parthenon, temple to gray-eyed Athena; the Eiffel Tower; the Arc de Triomphe; a Dutch windmill; a Nicolosi projection of the world; vintage travel ads for the Occident and Orient; a bulletin board barnacled with ivy-league postcards, pamphlets, and pennants.

J.'s eyes and hands lingered on her books packed end to end and top to bottom upon her concaved shelves, the overflow blooming in low stacks on all available surfaces, each title folded, spindled, and mutilated with the doting brutality of a Gallic irregular toward her dance partner (with apologies both here and throughout to W. G. Glass). In one small corner alone of Blue's heterodox collection, _The Scarecrow of Oz_ pressed against _Leaves of Grass_ , _Charlotte's Web_ blanketed _Moby-Dick_ and a Nietzsche reader, and _Anna Karenina_ kibitzed with _Huckleberry Finn_.

Despite the opacity of her bespoke classificatory system, the bulk of Blue's books could be loosely labeled as recommended reading for an Independent Study of Notable Dead Woman: Tragic Lives/Tragic Deaths. A lavalier microphone clipped to the consciousness of Clarissa Dalloway also caught Virginia Woolf's adjacent Cantabrigian lectures. Sylvia Plath's slim novel about the summer that Esther Greenwood spent in NYC rode shotgun to her own zaftig unabridged journals. Mary McCarthy burned bridges with the Vassar class of '33 and had enough fuel left over to immolate Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, Nixon, et al. in her articles (set that many fires and you'd die of lung cancer, too). In this manner, Blue appended a novel or short story collection with Selected Letters or Essays or Biographies; the overlaps formed maps to the capitals of undiscovered countries by way of narrow paths paved with the chopped, pulped, screened, pressed, dried, inked, and perfect-bound bones of those who had passed before.

Blue seemed a window through which J. could see the world. Perhaps he could escape through her, too, if he could figure out the latch. But first, he had to survive this party, a first-ditch iron-lung attempt to acclimate him to the pressure drop. He cadged a Heineken from the fridge, anesthetic to dull the pain of the procedure. The Chief Resident, Blue Sr., found the patient on her back porch attempting to self-administer the anodyne. She took vitals, tested reflexes, amputated the beer, and drew some blood.

"In all my years, I've never seen such a severe case of cultural decompression," Blue Sr. said.

"What's the prognosis?" J. asked.

"Terminally incorrigible."

"I'd like a second opinion."

" _Chelsea Girl_ is better than _Transformer_."

J. stiffed her on the copay and skulked back to his uncle's place before dinner with a book from Blue's shelves secreted away in his back pocket— _alea jacta est_ —to watch the Bronx Zoo crawl out of an 0—2 deficit against the Diamondbacks by taking Game Three of the World Series thanks to Clemens' deadly splitter and Brosius's tie-breaking rib eye.

As Matt the Bat grounded out, closing the game, an ipecac of hope churned in J.'s guts. He opened Blue's book, a small square volume of poetry by Irwin Allen Garden, took out a Bic, and underlined the dedication to a Solemn Man, noting that this was −perhaps− the greatest love poem ever written. J. also noted that Garden, cast out from the Land of Columbus, erected a dreamy cottage in the Western night of Rockland where he sipped tea with other children of the American bop night. That Francis DaPavia had a staggering angelic vision. That Cody Pomeray loved his way in and out of Denver and on the road. That a Crane flew off the Brooklyn Bridge (this actually happened). That Old Bull Lee withdrew to Morocco. That the Solemn Man hurled the potato salad. That J. once wrote down every six-letter word he could think of that mother might be. That Moloch foretold the advent of eternal war. That Duluoz gave the poem a name.

OOOOO

BOTH grifters and magicians benefit from dexterous fingers and a gift for misdirection, and J. had picked up some simple tricks from the shill, who likely saw J. as a second-story man in the making. The following evening, J. crossed paths with Blue while out walking through the town's solitary streets and returned her newly annotated book, his only attempt at everyday impossible actual honest-to-God _magic_ : a second chance for a first meeting. Her small smile lit a brief but bright lens flare in her clear-sky eyes when she flipped through its pages, saw his ballpointed scrawl, and looked up to find the same boy as before but also— _presto chango_ —a brand new J. As Blue sailed away into the supernatural darkness, _Howl_ in hand, she fired off a parting pop quiz to confirm his credentials—"Who the dickens could Boz be?" J. caught her shot—"Chuck D"—but she had already struck him square through the sternum with a bolt from the—

OOOOO

THAT Sunday, the Yankees lost a heart-pulping Game Seven played upon the irrigated Arizonan desert. As the Snakes swarmed Bell at the dish, the camera cut to Torre and almost immediately cut away, flinching from the molten silent suffering poured into his wax-cast face, an expression fit for the crowd at Calvary. J. turned off the television and stared at his warped visage in the cathode-warmed glass as a vast cement-gray sadness enveloped him. For the first time since his advent, he felt bereft of his home, his friends, himself.

The universe apportions only so much good fortune to each atman per samsara spin. If just once in your otherwise miserable life, love—weight of the world, miracle burning with purity, burden of life you wearily carry—crosses your path, you might as well say goodbye to poker and the Yankees right then and there; such luck will wipe out your credit with Ganesh for one, ten, a hundred, ten thousand lifetimes strung together in a metempsychotic chain across the vast length of a mahamanvantara. Maybe all you blessless losers can take comfort in the possibility that, even if only in some distant past life, you souls once knew love, true love.


	4. Chapter Four

Chapter Four

Welcome to The

Working

Week

PRESSED into service at his uncle's diner, J. set silverware, took orders, served food, refilled drinks, and bussed tables. He punched the antique cash register's stiff brass keys, impaling his tickets upon the check spindle. If the dishwasher had the night off or called out sick, J. sank elbow deep into the sudsy privacy of the stainless-steel sink, rinsing masticated remnants and dregs off plates and utensils and cups and mugs while his uncle covered his tables. At the end of the evening and with no small measure of relief, J. flipped the door sign to "Closed." He traded up the day's gratuities for large bills from the register and tipped out the cook and dishwasher. He married the condiment bottles: ketchup nightly, scraping clotted sauce from the glass-threaded screw tops, and mustard about once a week—refilling the empties from economy-sized jugs. He topped off the salt and pepper shakers and the porcelain sugar-pack caddies. He cleaned out the coffee makers and measured grinds for the next morning. He extracted the pies from the display case, swaddled them in plastic wrap, and rendered them unto the cool embrace of the refrigerator. He wiped the tables and counters, stacked the chairs, swept and mopped the floors, and schlepped pendulous sacks of garbage to the dumpster. His fellaheen efforts were rewarded at the state-mandated rate of $4.74 hourly plus tips.

OOOOO

THE diner served breakfast all day: scrambled eggs, sunny-side-up eggs, poached eggs, eggs over easy, omelets, Denver omelets, Jack omelets, egg-white omelets, chili-bean omelets, cheese omelets, Special Omelettes, toasts French and domestic, bagels, pancakes, blueberry pancakes, banana pancakes, chocolate-chip pancakes (with or without whipped cream), waffles, sweet rolls, bacon, turkey bacon, sausage, home fries, fruit salad, oatmeal, Froot Loops, Corn Flakes, Cocoa Krispies, Frosted Flakes, blueberry muffins, lemon poppy seed muffins, English muffins, cherry Danishes, chocolate doughnuts, cinnamon doughnuts, sprinkled doughnuts, jelly doughnuts, glazed doughnuts, maple doughnuts, etc. (No grapefruit.)

They served cream of tomato soup, ham on rye (toasted or untoasted), peanut butter and jelly, Cobb salads, chef salads, mac and cheese, grilled cheese and tomato, French dip, meatloaf, steak, mashed potatoes, salmon, roasted chicken, fried chicken, chicken pot pie, chicken salad sandwiches, egg salad sandwiches, tuna melts, turkey melts, turkey sandwiches, hot turkey, open-faced turkey, turkey burgers, B.L.T.s, −Monte Cristo sandwiches,− hamburgers, cheeseburgers, double cheeseburgers, chili burgers, BBQ burgers, etc., with sides of fries, chili fries, onion rings, pickles, chips, crackers, rolls, coleslaw, etc.

They served lemon meringue pie, apple pie, blueberry pie, key lime pie, cherry pie, pumpkin pie, peach pie, strawberry ice cream, assorted cakes—e.g., coffee cake, carrot cake, chocolate cake, finger white cake—etc.

They served Coke, Cherry Coke, milk, iced tea, regular tea, herbal tea, hot chocolate, coffee, etc.

Etc.

OOOOO

TO make the perfect burger, start with the right cut of meat. Befriend Sam the butcher; he has an eye for that Goldilocks sirloin, neither too fat nor too lean and unspoiled by gristle. Grind once. Splash with oyster sauce. Fold in a few breadcrumbs. Shape into an inch-tall puck. Shellac with melted butter. Slip onto a hot griddle. Flip once after a few minutes, seasoning each side with salt and pepper. Top with Cheddar cheese, an iceberg leaf, a tomato slice, a lachrymose loop of red onion, rest, and serve bleeding.

J. silently accepted these meals that were offered in silence, slid across the diner counter or waiting upon the kitchen table upstairs or placed in his occasionally outstretched palm, consecrated bovine body and blood, Americana madeleine, prepared by his uncle's hand. A fairly unremarkable recipe, family heirloom passed from J.'s grandmother to grandfather to J.'s uncle, yet never before nor since had J. enjoyed a more perfect patty. It tasted like the beatified caesura between dodging his classmates at school and dodging customers at work, like lazing in the apartment's leather lounger before his shift started and watching Golden-Age sitcom reruns or, if he ate late, crouching on a flipped-over milk crate alone in the stock room, plate propped atop his knees, burger in one hand, book in the other. It tasted like fire, it tasted like iron.

OOOOO

SOME of the diner's quidnuncs had known J.'s grandmother or grandfather or great uncle or remembered when the diner was a hardware store or had gone to school with J.'s mother or uncle. "I knew your grandmother," "I knew your grandfather," "I knew your great uncle," "I remember when the diner was a hardware store," "I went to school with your mother," "I went to school with your uncle," they told J. They were born and grew up and thrived or just survived and grew down in the small town. Never escaped themselves or the place that they lived. Most would die and be buried in the cemetery behind the church like their parents and their parents' parents and their parents' parents' parents and even their parents' parents' parents' parents before them. Like J.'s great uncle, who died down in the Sunshine State and posthumously flew steerage to rest in peace beside his brother, all on the dime and effort of J.'s uncle. For what? The dead, unlike the living, rarely mind where they lay. Would J. ever be tasked to select plot, casket, stone, and inscription for his own uncle? Would he oblige? In the key of A major, God only knows.

Adults hold fast to the past, for ahead loomed the dolmen realms and those fat graveyard worms inching ever closer, waiting to dine on their remains. _Et ego in Arcadia_. The young don't care where they're from, only where they're going.

OOOOO

OVER the pass hung a blackboard that proclaimed the day's specials. J.'s uncle periodically provided updates, but the board, like telephone wire, was a too-familiar background that patrons looked at without ever seeing. Each change, therefore, meant less than zero. But try to convince his uncle wiping away the Egg White Omelet and Turkey Bacon to replace them with Banana Pancakes and a Different Omelet.

"Nothing's special about those specials," J. said, brushing the dirt from a day's worth of soles into a dustpan. "No one's going to notice. No one's going to care."

"Keep sweeping," his uncle said, squinting with concentration as he white-knuckled the chalk, weaving his wobbly letters in a choppy swell up and down the board and finishing with a flourish of unparalleled lines under each item.

A few nights later, while his uncle slept, J. snuck down and updated the sign. Not until halfway through the following lunch rush did a flummoxed customer finally ask J.'s uncle just what ex _act_ ly was so special about today's tap water, anyways? J. returned from school, bounded past his uncle and up the stairs as a slight satisfied smirk briefly crossed his lips, and entered the apartment to find the sign lolling on the couch, his amendment erased and replaced with this telegraphically succinct message:

SIGN GREAT

WRONG SPECIAL

L_'S SPECIAL OMELET $4.95

PLEASE FIX ASAP

J. dry-wiped the board with a paper towel. A pastel-dusted cigar box sat on the coffee table. Normally left under the counter, it held, at various times, Connecticut-wrapped panatelas, baseball cards, and now the remaindered fragments of extruded multicolored calcium carbonate blackboard chalk. Selecting an ivory nub from the stash, J. dashed off the text in thin cuneiform slashes. He stepped back and imagined the amazing Technicolor eyes of all tomorrow's patrons raised in supplication at his work. A town without pity, a town called malice, even a really big nothing town still deserved a better Today's Special sign than _this_.

J. wiped it down again, this time with a damp rag, and left it to air dry. Flipped through a stack of CDs and, after some consideration, popped one into a small portable stereo. Sank into the couch, cradling his spiral-bound notebook. Sketched out the words with a No. 2 Ticonderoga on azure college-ruled staves between a drawing of the Sex Pistols' ransom-note logo and the first verse of "London Calling"—notes from English class. Grabbed a handful of colors. Copied his sketch onto the board. Adjusted the letters' width and weight to match the TODAY'S SPECIAL printed across the top of the board. On the stereo, Ziggy told J. not to blow it 'cause he knew it was all worthwhile—maybe that explained the fuchsia six-pointed star he added to fill some space.

J. carried the board down to the diner and handed it to his uncle.

"You spelled it wrong," his uncle said. "Oh em ee el ee tee, full stop. Not tee tee ee."

"It's French."

"Oh, okay. Fine. I mean, they invented the thing, right?"

"But not the fries."

"Is that a knife on fire under the price?"

"Look at this guy with the jeweler's eye."

"Just asking."

"You wanted a sign? You got a sign. If you want happy little trees, the chalk is upstairs."

J.'s uncle held the board at arm's length and stared at it for a long moment, nodded to himself in satisfaction, and returned it to the wall, carefully—perhaps even a little gently—adjusting the picture wire on the mounting hooks to ensure the frame stayed level.

The diner's diners gazed at this incandescent heir to _Campbell's Soup Cans_ fresh off The Factory floor that now crowned the pass. No calligraphy classes for J.; the young man's hand burned with a prodigious scrivening talent forged in paperback peripheries. A damp teary glass settled over the onlookers' dilating pupils. Entranced, beatified, their jaws slackened. Spittle drip drip dripped onto plastic-sleeved menus. Hands drifted into the air to change already-placed orders to the special. Passersby rubbernecked on the sidewalk, pressing faces to glass. A mob accumulated, surged through the doors. They crowded the tables and wallflowered shoulder to shoulder. The waiters, unable to press through the pack, passed plates like a bucket brigade. The special sold better than any special in the history of the diner. Word spread to New Preston, to Bethlehem, to Woodbury, across the Naugatuck Valley, throughout Greater Bridgeport, and beyond. A deluge of customers drowned the town. Traffic stacked up along every street and avenue. Egg shortages blossomed throughout the state.

Your brain might set off similar pyrotechnics if a certain soft voice sidled up to your register and, with a knowing tone, said, "Nice sign."

OOOOO

MORNINGS on her way to the bus stop and afternoons before heading home, Blue breezed into the diner in saddle shoes, black nylons in winter or knee-highs in spring and fall, plaid skirt, bleached-bone or cornflower Oxford, pearl snap cross tie, and private school navy blazer she swam in despite her mother's alterations. Borne upon her back, a goldenrod pack so swollen with books that when she hefted it—graceful as a shot putter—off her sinewy shoulders to stash under a seat, her spine rebounded with an audible whipcrack.

Mornings were for fleeting kaffeeklatsches before classes, but afternoons allowed a more languid café après-midi, albeit one marked by a cairn of textbooks, notepads, folders, handouts, highlighters, pens, and pencils carefully piled at counter or table.

Blue also appeared in mufti for evening dinners, weekend brunches, and late nights after town halls or movie screenings at the bookstore either alone or chaperoned by Blue Sr. or her best and only friend, a girl called Neal. Infrequently, wearing running pants and an ecstatic, aesthetic face, like Ares came Blue's Midwest billboard-built gigantic high school loverboy, taller far than a tallboy.

Conversations between Blue and J. played out at postal rates. "Václav Havel was a big Velvet Underground fan," she said between wincing sips of her hot coffee, pointing at J.'s _White Light/White Heat_ tee shirt, which he often wore at work because black hid stains best. Before he could reply, Blue spotted the inbound to Hartford and backpedaled out the door. Dew misted beneath her crepe soles as she leapt across the town square only to return hours later lassoed in white phosphor dusklight arcing through the park trees (her school paper meeting ran late). Flickering streetlamp lights poked holes in the inky windowpanes as she packed her books to head home. J. pulled a copy of _Between Thought and Expression_ from his back pocket and flipped it onto the table.

"Room for one more?" he asked. Blue examined Lou Reed's blurry matte profile on the front cover and the pull quotes on the back. She riffled the pages to her receipt, which he had tucked in as a bookmark. "It's mostly poems," J. said, "Lyrics, actually, but near the end, there's an interview with Havel just after he was elected president."

Blue very carefully wedged it into her mobile library. She hoisted her burden, spun slowly on her heels, homeward bound, and opened the door to leave.

"If you close the door," J. said, "the night could last forever."

"I'd never have to see the day again," she sang over her shoulder without missing a step.

They overshot each other the following a.m., but she stopped by the diner between nones and vespers.

"Why couldn't Lou just have said 'yes' in the first place when Havel asked him to play that show?" Blue asked, returning the book. "He was so slippery about it until the very end of the interview. His music clearly meant so much to Havel, to the Velvet Revolution."

J. shrugged. "Some people," he replied, "prefer to hide their light under a bushel." He held the book back out to her. "You can keep it longer if you want."

"I already finished it. It was hard to read the early pieces without the songs sounding through."

"Same."

"I liked his snarky little liner notes—or whatever you call the poetry equivalent of liner notes. We're going to try and dig up the Moe Tucker cover that Lou mentioned." Blue glanced at Neal, restively tapping time on the street curb outside the diner. "I should go."

J. tucked the book back into his pocket. That weekend, Blue and Blue Sr., arms linked jauntily at the elbow, stopped by for lunch. J.'s uncle took their order and served their food; J. had his own tables to tend to. Still, he cleared their plates and mugs when Blue Sr. went to the counter to settle up.

"Before I forget," Blue said, "here." She took a book from her bag, _Letters to Olga_. J. shifted the bus tub to one arm to accept her proffer with his free hand. "It's the collection of letters Havel wrote to his wife, one a week almost every week for four years, while he was in prison."

"He mentions it to Lou."

"Right. Rushdie said it was one of the few books he kept with him during the _fatwa_. This and _Ulysses_. Anyway, I thought you might be interested."

"I'm always in the market for words of comfort to cushion myself from the persecution of provincial Stasi."

Blue's eyes rolled skyward. "Hardly."

"Well, if it's good enough for Rushdie…" J. tucked the book under his arm and hoisted the tub away before Blue Sr. returned.

Havel complained to Olga about his hemorrhoids, back aches, fevers. He harangued her for not writing more letters and for not writing the type of letters he wanted to read. He begged her for vitamins, tea, cigarettes. He asked her to post a note to Vonnegut, a friend of his. He mentioned books he was reading, _The Pickwick Papers_ , _To Kill a Mockingbird_ , _The Stranger_ , Brod's biography of Kafka, some Hemingway, _Herzog_. He reflected on the specificity of homesickness that afflicts the imprisoned: longing to swim in the public pool, to go to the movies, to drink at a favorite bar, to eat steak, barbecued chicken, cake with whipped cream. He dreamed of a horizon beyond the walls that enclosed him, a horizon beyond all horizons. J. looked out the window to the looming mountain of Mien Mo, hunkered blacker than black against the starpricked void, and tried and tried and tried to picture past it to that jagged luminous silhouette of the island of the Manhattoes.

Some days, Blue and J. spoke little, some days not at all. Still, no matter which way he faced, he sensed her presence in the diner by the subtle disarrangement of all his bodily fluids listing toward her—a moon claiming its tides. Days their paths missed by minutes or miles were long. J. had thought himself corroded iron through and through, but when Blue landed in his life, he discovered that underneath his patina of rust lay a damp Plaster of Paris, for the force of her impact left a perfect negative mold, an emptiness that only she filled. Politesse kept townspeople from pointing and laughing outright at his new deformity. He tried to hide it, he tried to deny it, but the symptoms were incontrovertible: he had been crushed by Blue.


	5. Chapter Five

**Chapter Five**

 **Fight Song**

QUEUE up every tune you can think of for a mix tape about school. The Replacements missing the bus to stay cool, The Ramones looking for kicks and chicks, The White Stripes making new friends, The Police and Van Halen leering at students and teachers, Chuck Berry trying to get through classes without getting hassled, The Beach Boys sporting their letterman sweaters to Friday night fights after the football game, Mötley Crüe taking a smoke break in the second-floor lavatory, Nirvana wondering where recess went, Sam Cooke not claiming to be an A student, The Dead Kennedys getting on the honor roll, The Boomtown Rats and Pearl Jam calling in tips on classmates, Pink Floyd not needing no education, Dinah Washington requesting an after-hours tutor, Mission of Burma not not not not not not not not being your academy, The Smiths running from the headmaster, The Runaways waving goodbye to their school days, Al Green and The Kinks wishing they could go back to those happiest days of their lives, Alice Cooper demoing the premises. You could arrange them alphabetically or chronologically or autobiographically. You could arrange them narratively. You could arrange them by a code known to no one, not even yourself, tracks thrown like sticks to divine the past.

OOOOO

ACROSS the street from the diner loomed the town's two-story Federal-style high school, brickskinned Bridewell, propped up with little more than a pair of whitewashed Doric columns and John Dewey's dream of progressive education. It could have stood in for a city hall or fire station or police precinct. Maybe it had, maybe it would. Why begrudge buildings their dreams of burnished yesterdays and better tomorrows?

J.'s uncle, near-alumnus of the institution, set himself single-mindedly to one goal: his nephew, capped and gown-wrapped, crossing portable plywood stage to receive parchment proof of release. That the nephew failed should not detract from the admirable effort on the part of the uncle.

OOOOO

If the balance of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most preposterous conclusions but we have reason to cool our raging motions our carnal stings our unbitted lusts whereof I take this that you call love to be a figure which when an angle is constructed at the center of the circle is contained by straight lines containing the angle and the circumference cut off by them by furnishing material and financial assistance to the participating countries in such a manner as to aid them through their own individual and concerted efforts to become independent of extraordinary outside economic assistance within the period of operation under this title by a rank that if treated as a division of a genus or subgenus is deemed to be of subgeneric rank for the purposes of _une petite secte on est tout miel pour les gens qui en sont on n'a pas assez de dédain pour les gens qui n'en sont pas_ and on and on and on the hebetudinous tones flowed mechanically from the flapping noisome mouthholes of J.'s teachers. Attention is currency, and they demanded J. pay them his, but he saved that coin for the perimeters of their performances: as the last of their charges filed out the door after the bell sounded, as they sat in an otherwise empty break room and gnawed on sallow sandwiches, as they shambled in worn-down soles through quiescent halls, as they snuck cigarettes or nips in their cars between periods. In the moments they believed themselves unseen, their shoulders slumped and spines drooped, their breath wheezed slow and long and sad through their lips, their eyes filmed over with a concussed glaze. President Carter would have spotted the symptoms of malaise, the crises of confidence common to those who had dutifully followed the directions to a lifetime of happiness only to turn back and discover they had at each turn and bend sacrificed any real chances for happiness that wandered across their paths until they found themselves trapped in versions of their lives neither planned nor hoped for.

Unlike those teachers, J.'s uncle did not believe in happiness and thus assumed himself inoculated from despair. But observing the man, J. saw a _kulak_ with his big barn and pasture, taking orders, serving food, clearing tables. With each step, he carved a threadless labyrinth, Minotaur and Daedalus wrapped in the same flannel straitjacket. And what lay at the maze's exit? Burnished by self-reflection's sun, a mirror.

OOOOO

PRANKS provide texture to the Teflon days, the days that threaten to be the same today as the day before as the day after.

J. ordered a double-cheese and sausage pie from the pizza joint across the street that arrived in the middle of his history class. "Spicoli?" the delivery boy asked. "Spicoli?" No one answered. The teacher winged the whole box out an open window, feast for fauna, and returned to his simile likening the battle of Stalingrad to the '67 Ice Bowl between the Cowboys and Packers.

Before a football pep rally, J. switched out the marching band's Sousa sheet music with "Corona" in honor of their school mascot, the Minuteman. Only Neal owned _Double Nickels on the Dime_. She was not amused. The front four agreed that it sounded like the _Jackass_ theme song, but J., lacking cable, could not confirm.

On a bright cold day in April, J. came across a sale for double-bell alarm clocks in Woodbridge. He struck a deal to buy the whole lot, synchronized them to sound at one p.m., snuck into school overnight, and secreted them into desk drawers, lockers, drop ceilings, and air ducts throughout the building. Days like that day, as the countdown ticked away, J. felt himself a damned soul grasping at his last morsel of pleasure. He worried with his thumb the florid key-shaped bruise on the inside of his index digit, tattooed from the effort of winding all the springs. At thirteen hundred hours, J. stopped up his ears with a pair of foam plugs, and the clocks shivered the rust from their innards in a clangorous tocsin, splitting the air into a million little pieces. Students and teachers alike, palms plastered to ears, lurched through the building, seeking the sources of shrieking. The first few discovered were celebrated with triumphant yawps that fizzled into frustration upon the realization that the switch on every clock had been extracted from the casing and the hole soldered shut, rendering them unturnoffable. While the mechanical-minded puzzled over the screaming timepieces, a dim filament bloomed behind Tallboy's eyes. He grabbed one of the offending clocks from a classmate, brandished it high overhead, and dashed it against the floor. Others quickly followed suit, culminating in a frenzied, gleeful, terrifying mechanical slaughter. Weeks after, they were still stepping on errant gears, dials, and glass. _Fugit inreparabile tempus_.

OOOOO

THREE o'clock, behind the school, by the bleachers, at the bridge. A proffer, almost but not quite polite, dueling etiquette that even Goethe might recognize. J. never issued one but never turned one down, either. At the appointed hour and place, a supersaturated solution of straggling students precipitated into a crystalline circle. Fight fight fight fight they chanted, for all mobs no matter how modest carry within them the Colosseum.

Sadly, none of those small-town boys knew how to square their shoulders, how to make a fist, how to throw a punch. They swung wild haymakers at the air. They attempted half-remembered wrestling moves from gym class. An exquisitely forged doctor's note stating J. suffered from phantom limb syndrome released him from those sweat-lacquered confines, so he relied on his predilection for unsportsmanlike conduct.

Fights provided J. relief from himself, briefly banked an inferno of unknown provenance that burned him all his livelong days. Refined the school day to a point. Sped the second hand in a rush and a push. Still, losses and wins alike bought blood and bruises, and neither earned him respite from harassment. Better to elide the whole bad school trip as often as possible and live to spite another day. Still, trouble somehow found J.

OOOOO

ALL roads lead to Rome. J. often trod the path to that sovereign land of school's empire. Fight? Principal's office. Skip? Principal's office. Talk back to teacher? Principal's office. Rest your head on a pillow of your folded arms and close your eyes? Prriiinnnnccccciiiipppaal's office. Never sent to the man, only the office, a synechdochial transfer of the power vested in him by Regional School District No. 12 to the room itself.

Framed portraits of early twentieth-century American presidents and degrees in education—a Bachelor's from Ohio University and a Master's from UMass—faced off across an expanse of thin gray fire-resistant carpet. Gray file cabinets scaled the gray walls. A mounted wooden baseball bat lurked behind the chairs reserved for visitors.

On the desktop, a phalanx of canted happy family photographs stood guard between the principal's eyeline and interlopers. Bronze bookends of the Lincoln Memorial clasped between their seatbacks a leather-bound series. Still sand bellied the bottom of a small hourglass, its ballot cast for eternity outside of time. Painted clay statuettes of a pit bull, a beagle, and a collie hunkered on their haunches and gazed ahead in glazed obeisance. A pewter hound dog stalked a scent across a nearby end table.

J. knew one other person who loved dogs as much as the principal seemed to. Not all who have been betrayed, battered, and broken by people seek refuge in the beatific guilelessness of animals, and not all who surround themselves with pets have logged definitive and unoptimistic conclusions on their own species. But around those who do and those who have, tread gently, for they will expect you to serve as either witness or evidence in their never-ending prosecution of humanity.

Exchanges between the principal and J. followed a tiresome script, save once, when J. interrupted the principal's lecture about the importance of punctuality or respecting school property or applying himself to interject, "You and my uncle have both perfected that angry-but-really-more-disappointed-than-anything-else face. Practice really does get you to Carnegie Hall."

Such interruptions usually provoked an increase of volume, inflammation of tone, and escalation of scared-straight rhetoric, but that day, seized perhaps by some Zen paroxysm, the principal simply switched his conversational tracks to J.'s signal. "I'd like to meet him," he replied.

"Who?"

"Your uncle."

"Stop by the diner sometime. For a buck fifty, coffee's on the house."

"Perhaps we could schedule a time for him to come in."

"Or you two could go hit a few fungoes."

"I don't play."

"The toothpick threw me," J. said, gesturing a hitchhiker's thumb over his shoulder at the bat. "You a big Joe Clark fan? Got a bullhorn in one of your desk drawers?"

"It was my father's." The principal hesitated, then continued in an unfamiliar register, one stripped of the functionary, and the answer that followed was addressed to a person rather than a student. "He played for the Black Barons."

J. bit his lip, nodded once, stared at his hands. After what he deemed a respectful lacuna, J. asked, "Did he know Satchel Paige?"

The principal smiled. "They missed each other by a few years."

"Why do you keep the bat up there?"

"It's a reminder."

"Of what?"

The second question shook the principal from his reverie, a hope freely given but unearned that the child sitting across from him had been capable of extrapolating all that was unspoken in the first response. The veil descended, the moment passed. Returned to himself, the principal said in his usual tone, "Just a reminder," and abruptly—albeit not unkindly—dismissed J. without further remonstrance.

Reflecting on that conversation as he returned to class, J. thought he understood the answer. Much later, J. realized that he would never understand—not with that marrow-deep instinct that presages thought. It was not the principal's response that lacked but the question itself. A lesson not taught was not always a lesson not learned.


End file.
